Ethical Design and Conduct of Focus Groups in Bioethics Research

Focus groups can provide a rich and meaningful context in which to explore diverse bioethics topics. They are particularly useful for describing people's experiences of and/or attitudes toward specific ethical conundrums, but can also be used to identify ethics training needs among medical professionals, evaluate ethics programs and consent processes, and stimulate patient advocacy. This chapter discusses these and other applications of focus group methodology. It examines how to ethically and practically plan and recruit for, conduct, and analyze the results of focus groups. The place of focus groups among other qualitative research methods is also discussed.